Director,
T.E.(Terry)
Manning,
Schoener 50,
1771 ED Wieringerwerf,
The Netherlands.
Tel:
0031-227-604128
Homepage:
http://www.flowman.nl
E-mail: (nameatendofline)@xs4all.nl : bakensverzet
Incorporating
innovative social, financial, economic, local administrative and productive
structures, numerous renewable energy applications, with an important role for
women in poverty alleviation in rural and poor urban environments.
"Money is not
the key that opens the gates of the market but the bolt that bars them"
Gesell, Silvio The
Natural Economic Order
Revised English
edition, Peter Owen, London 1958, page 228
Edition 14: 26
April, 2008
Attachment
52 : Development
and Sustainability, Fritjof Capra, Center for Ecoliteracy, Berkeley, 2005.
The following
article is Copyright 2005 Fritjof Capra, Berkeley, and is re-printed here with
kind permission of the author.
Begin citation of
article by F. Capra
Development and
Sustainability by Fritjof Capra
Development
In its original meaning, "development" identifies a
fundamental characteristic of all life. Over the past twenty years, a
scientific understanding of life has emerged at the forefront of science,
clarifying the roots and basic dynamics of the process of development.
One of the basic characteristics of life is that living systems are
open systems. They need a continual flow of energy and matter (air, food,
water, etc.) to stay alive. The detailed dynamics of this flow of energy and
matter have been studied in great detail over the past two decades, leading to
a very important discovery.
Living systems generally remain in a stable state, but every now and
then an open system will encounter a point of instability, in which there is
either a breakdown or, more frequently, a spontaneous emergence of new forms of
order. This spontaneous emergence of order at critical points of instability
(often referred to simply as "emergence") is one of the hallmarks of
life. It has been recognized as the dynamic origin of development, learning,
and evolution. In other words, creativity—the generation of new forms—is a key
property of all living systems.
This new understanding shows us that development is a fundamental
property of life. All living systems develop; life continually reaches out to
create novelty. What is created depends on the systems' internal structures.
And since these internal structures change in the process of development, the
path of development when new order emerges is a path of ongoing structural
changes.
Development and Growth
The life sciences teach us that the development of living systems
includes periods of rapid physical growth—e.g., the period of a young organism,
or the early ("pioneer") phase of an ecosystem that is characterized
by rapid expansion and colonization of the territory. This rapid growth is
always followed in organisms by slower growth, maturation, and ultimately
decline and decay, and in ecosystems by so-called succession.
When we study nature, we can see quite clearly that, although growth
is a central characteristic of life, indefinite and unrestricted growth is not
sustainable. For example, cancer cells grow rapidly, but the growth is not
sustainable because the cancer cells die when the host organism dies. It is
important, however, to realize that there can still be development without
physical growth, because there can be learning and maturing.
Economic Development
Contrast the concept of development as it is used by corporate
economists and by politicians. The first thing we notice is the different
grammatical use of the verb "develop." In the life sciences,
"develop" is used as an intransitive verb: All living systems
develop; living organisms develop; people develop. There is a sense of
unfolding, of realizing potential.
Economists, by contrast, use the verb "develop" as a
transitive verb: "People develop things." There is a whole category
of business people who call themselves developers, and they go around
developing things—real estate, land, office blocks, etc.
The concept of Southern or "Third World" development rests
very uneasily between those two meanings. First of all, it is a very recent
concept. Before the Second World War no one would have thought of development
as an economic category at all. But after World War II, it was almost always
used in a transitive sense. People would go out and develop the Third World,
without any perception of the power relations involved in that concept, which
shows the most extraordinary lack of respect.
I'm sure that if anyone came up to you and said, "I'm going to
develop you," you would be suspicious of their motives, apart from
wondering what they had in mind. Yet that is precisely what Third World
development entails: people with power going out and developing other people.
The other extraordinary phenomenon is the categorization of the
entire world into a single dimension. Countries and people are
"developed," or they are "developing," or they are
"underdeveloped." It's like a soccer league table, with the rich
countries (first and foremost the United States) at the top, and the poor
countries at the bottom. Never mind that 25 percent of children in the U.S. now
live below the poverty level, that we spend more on prisons than on higher
education, and that we are the only industrial country that has the death
penalty.
The huge diversity of human existence is concentrated into a single
dimension called "development," which is very often measured simply
in terms of income per capita. It is absolutely staggering that we, as
intelligent people, living in this extraordinarily diverse world, have allowed
such an intellectual construct to become so powerful.
When we look at the concept of economic development in more detail,
we can identify three basic characteristics:
(1) Development is a Northern concept. The league
table—"developed/developing/ underdeveloped"—is arranged according to
Northern criteria. Those countries that are "developed" are those
that have adopted the Northern industrial way of life. It is a profoundly
monocultural concept. To be a developing country means to be succeeding in the
aspiration of becoming more like the North.
(2) Development means economic development. No other social
aspirations or cultural values are allowed to get in the way. If they can
coexist with that development, okay; if they can't coexist with it, they are
overridden.
(3) Economic development is a top-down process. Decisions and control
rest firmly in the hands of experts, managers of international capital,
bureaucrats of state governments, the World Bank, the IMF, etc.
The Rules of Development
This narrow notion of economic development is enforced by stringent
rules, set up by the WTO and the other global financial institutions. These
"free trade" rules assure that trade is not free, but is a one-way
street, where the Southern countries are forced to open their markets to the
North, but are often prevented by steep trade barriers from successfully
exporting their goods.
The global economy is a network of computers programmed according to
these rules. Underlying all the rules is a single fundamental principle, the principle
that money should take precedence over anything else—human rights, democracy,
environmental protection, or any other value. But the same electronic networks
of financial and informational flows could have other values built into them.
The critical issue is not technology, but politics.
The Global Civil Society and an Alternative View of Development
At the turn of this century, an impressive global coalition of NGOs
formed around the core values of human dignity and ecological sustainability.
This coalition is known as the global justice movement, or the global civil
society. At several worldwide gatherings, known as the World Social Forums,
civil society leaders have proposed a set of alternative trade policies,
including concrete and radical proposals for restructuring the global financial
institutions, which would profoundly change the nature of globalization. Their
proposals embody a notion of development that includes the values of human
dignity and ecological
sustainability.
The alternative view of development proposed by the global civil
society sees development as a creative process, characteristic of all life, a
process of increasing capability, in which the most important thing one needs
is control over local resources.
In this view, the development process is not purely an economic
process. It is also a social, ecological, and ethical process—a
multidimensional and systemic process. The primary actors in development are
the institutions of civil society—NGOs and other associations based on kin, on
neighborhood, or on common interests.
Because people are different and the places in which they live are
different, we can expect development to produce cultural diversity of all
kinds. The process whereby it will happen will be very different from the
current global trading system. It will be based on the mobilization of local
resources to satisfy local needs, and it will be informed by the values of
human dignity and ecological sustainability. Living sustainably means
recognizing that we are an inseparable part of the web of life, of human and
nonhuman communities, and that enhancing the dignity and sustainability of any
one of them will enhance all the others.
Fritjof Capra is a cofounder and
chair of the board of directors of the Center for Ecoliteracy. This paper is
adapted from a 2004 presentation at the University of California, Berkeley.
End citation of article by F. Capra
The
basic principles behind the project are:
a)The enhancement of self-sufficiency within the framework
of cooperative, interest-free, inflation-free local economies.
b)Existing social traditions will not suffer.
c)Local expertise, labour and materials will be used.
d)Women will play an active role in the project.
e)The people in the project area are able and willing
to take full responsibility for all structures, goods and services provided
under the project and for its administration.
f)The users contribute financially to capital
repayments, cover on-going costs and accept the powers of the elected tank- and
well commissions.
g)The project is self-funding. Savings on traditional
fuel costs for cooking and services will cover most of the project costs.
h)The supply of traditional natural fertiliser for
agricultural purposes will not be compromised.
i)Each individual user will be enabled to meet his
financial commitments to the project.
Household difficulties in meeting monthly
formal money quotas can be cushioned either from the monthly allowances
received by the tank commissions, by social support at tank-commission,
well-commission or project level. Local money obligations will be cushioned by
creating a simple LETS system safety net. Members temporarily in difficulty
will be allowed to run up a larger than usual debit balance. Their debits are
covered by social support (families, friends, other groups) at tank-commission,
well-commission or project level
j)'Small is beautiful'.
Small decentralised systems are preferred wherever possible. This promotes
close contact of the people in the project area with the structures set up and
their operation.
k) Local LETS currencies will complement the
lack of formal money in the project area that would otherwise be needed to
expand the quantity of local goods and services
transferred there. Economic development within the LETS systems will
also stimulate growth in the formal economy which will increase its formal tax
base.
l)The (grant, seed loan) capital will be
systematically recycled to users as interest-free micro-credits as it is
repaid. The micro-credits will allow goods and services for productivity
increase that cannot be locally produced to be bought with formal currency
outside the project area.
m)Leakage of formal currency out of the project
area will be reduced and if possible eliminated altogether. Seed capital will
be retained in the local area at least for
10 years, after which, if it is in the form of an interest-free loan, it
will be repaid.
n) 25 Progressive graduated steps
to local development
Dan Chiras and Dave Wann of Evergreen, Colorado
(USA) have devised a list of 25 steps to help to create sustainable
neighbourhoods in developed countries.
They are cited from the periodical The Last Straw, Issue 35, Fall 2001,
p. 11. Some, but not all, of the
initiatives are built into this project. Others could typically be taken under
the local money systems set up to strengthen community ties.
o) Articles 119-126 of
the 1999 Constitution of Venezuela, on the rights of indigienous peoples.
Forward: five
basic conditions.
Back: economic
bases of the Model.
List of drawings and
graphs.
Typical list of maps.
List of key
words.
List of
abbreviations used.
Documents for
funding applications.